Civil War on the Left, Part 52: Manning Versus the Man

Paul has already taken note of the Maryland Senate candidacy of Chelsea Manning, but I think we have overlooked the comic possibilities of the identity politics train wreck this might offer. To wit, from Glenn Greenwald today:

. . . Manning’s opponent in the Democratic Party primary is one of the most standard, banal, typical, privileged and mediocre politicians in the U.S. Congress: Benjamin Cardin, a 74-year-old white, straight man who is seeking his third six-year Senate term. Cardin’s decades-long career as a politician from the start has been steeped in unearned privilege: he first won elective office back in 1966, when his uncle, Maurice Cardin, gave up his seat in order to bequeath it to his nephew Benjamin. With this dynastic privilege as his base, he has spent the last 50 years climbing the political ladder in Maryland. . .

Establishment Democrats wasted no time in mocking and denouncing Manning’s bid to become the first ever trans woman in the Senate, instead quickly lining up in support behind the straight white male who has wielded power for decades. To demean Manning, many of these establishment Democrats invoked the primary tactic they now reflexively use against anyone they view as a political adversary: they depicted her as a tool of the Kremlin, whose candidacy is really just a disguised plot engineered by Moscow.

Leading the way in spreading this obviously deranged but acceptable-in-DC conspiracy theory was Neera Tanden, the president of the largest Democratic Party think tank in Washington. Last night, Tanden spread a viral tweet that strongly implied – without even pretending to have a shred of evidence – that the Kremlin had engineered Manning’s candidacy as punishment for Cardin’s hard-line position on Russia

Good thing I ordered a 55-gallon drum of popcorn this week.

Meanwhile, when will we ever get the Manning Senate campaign that we really want: Peyton Manning??